The Street That Isn't There

Linus had been checking map data for eleven months before he met a street that failed every test. The aerial images showed a row of lock-up garages and a drainage ditch where the record claimed a lane called Tallow Row. It was one hundred and forty metres long, with seven house numbers and a dead end. No survey had touched it since the file was created, no delivery driver had ever flagged it, and no postcode pointed its way. By the rules of his job it was a ghost, and ghosts were deleted.

莱纳斯核对地图数据已经十一个月了，才遇上一条通不过任何检验的街。航拍图上，记录里写着一条叫牛脂巷的小巷的地方，只有一排带锁的车库和一条排水沟。那条巷子长一百四十米，有七个门牌号，尽头是死路。自从文件建立以来，没有人勘测过它，没有送货司机报告过它，没有一个邮政编码指向它。按他这份工作的规则，它是一个幽灵，而幽灵是要被删除的。

He could have clicked "remove" and moved on to the next of the afternoon's two hundred flags. Had the queue been shorter that Friday, he probably would have done exactly that. Instead, because the name nagged at him and the office was half empty, he took a train out to the district and walked to the place where the lane ought to have begun.

他本可以点一下“移除”，接着去处理下午的另外两百条标记。要是那个星期五待办的队列短一些，他多半就那样做了。可是，因为那个名字总在心里挥之不去，加上办公室里已经人去楼空，他搭火车去了那个区，走到了小巷本该开始的地方。

There was only a concrete wall, streaked green at the base, and in front of it an old woman on a folding stool with a flask of tea, sitting as if she were on guard. When he explained that he worked for the company that kept the maps, she nodded without surprise.

那里只有一堵混凝土墙，墙根长着一片绿苔，墙前坐着一位老太太，坐在折叠凳上，带着一壶茶，坐的架势就像在站岗。他解释说自己是为维护地图的公司工作的，她听了点点头，毫不意外。

"Then you've come about Tallow Row," she said.

“那你是为牛脂巷来的。”她说。

Her name was Wilhelmina, and she told the story with the evenness of someone who had rehearsed it for years without an audience. The lane had been cleared in her youth to make way for a road that was never finished. Within a year the neighbours had scattered across the city, and the garages had gone up over whatever remained. What she still did, most mornings, was walk it. Starting at the wall, she counted seven doors, past the cobbler's radio in the window and the third paving stone that always rocked, to the bakery's side entrance where the lane stopped.

她叫威廉敏娜，讲起这件事来语气平稳，像是多年来对着空无一人的听众演练过无数遍。那条巷子在她年轻时就被清除了，为的是给一条始终没修完的马路让路。不到一年，街坊四邻就散落到了城市各处，车库则盖在了剩下的一切之上。她如今仍然做的，是大多数早晨沿着它走一遍。从那堵墙开始，她数过七扇门，经过橱窗里补鞋匠的收音机，经过第三块总会晃动的铺路石，一直走到面包店的侧门，巷子就在那里终止。

Linus looked down. Beneath the skin of the tarmac he could just make out the grey line of an old kerb, curving where no kerb should. It would seem that the street had existed in every sense except the one his software could verify. Not until that moment had it occurred to him that a map might be less a record of where things are than an argument about which things count.

莱纳斯低头看去。在柏油路面的表皮之下，他隐约能辨出一道灰色的旧路缘线，在不该弯的地方弯了过去。看来，这条街在各种意义上都存在过，只除了他的软件所能核实的那一种。直到这一刻，他才第一次想到，一张地图与其说是对事物所在之处的记录，不如说是一场争论，争论的是哪些东西算数。

"It would take me a quarter of a minute to remove it," he said, more to himself than to her.

“移除它，只要我四分之一分钟，”他说，更像是说给自己听。

"I know." Wilhelmina poured the last of the tea into the flask's cup and held it out to him. "It took them rather longer to build the road, and they never finished that either."

“我知道，”威廉敏娜把最后一点茶倒进保温壶的杯盖里，递给他，“他们修那条路可花了长得多的时间，而且到头来也没修完。”

On the train back he opened the file and let the cursor rest over "remove" until the screen dimmed. The system would allow him to mark the street as unverified for ninety days, after which the flag would return. That, he decided, was as much as a person in his position could honestly claim. He typed a single line into the notes field, "Visited; absent on the ground; walked daily by a resident", and saved it. Outside, the backs of the houses slid past in the dusk, and he caught himself counting their doors, seven to a row.

回程的火车上，他打开了那个文件，让光标停在“移除”上，直到屏幕暗了下去。系统允许他把这条街标记为“未核实”，为期九十天，之后标记会重新弹出来。他决定，在他这个位置上，这已经是一个人能够诚实地做到的极限了。他在备注栏里敲下一行字：“已实地走访；地面上不存在；有居民每日步行经过”，然后保存。窗外，一排排房子的后墙在暮色中掠过，他发现自己在数它们的门，一排七扇。